“Shut up,” said Rich, and slapped him hard on both cheeks. “I got a better idea.” He got a hammer lock on Conn’s left arm and forced him to his feet. He pushed him forward and kept pushing him through the cellar door, down the steps, and into a closet that was lined on both walls with wine bins and case goods. He closed the door and locked it.
“Will he suffocate?” said June.
“No. But I’ll bet he has a headache by the time they find him. He can holler his head off and nobody’ll hear him.”
“How long’ll he be there?”
“Oh, the day man comes on around ten o’clock. That gives him around five hours. In the dark. It’s gonna seem longer.”
“I hope,” said June.
They went upstairs, and in the back room he said: “Well, have a good look at the joint. You won’t be seeing it again.”
“No,” she said.
They went out the side door, and as they headed west she took his arm. “You,” she said.
“That’s right,” he said. “Me.”
(1960)
JOHN BARTON ROSEDALE, ACTORS’ ACTOR
There is a lot of truculent style to John Barton Rosedale as he goes to his mailbox—never locked—and flips open the little brass door and slams it shut. He knows there will be nothing of importance in the box; he knows that the other actors, whom he has to pass on his way to the bank of mailboxes, know it too. Nevertheless he continues to make that defiant entrance every afternoon. He will not let those other actors keep him from observing this small ceremony. If he once gives in, if he once fails to pretend to pretend that he has good reason to expect to find some important communication in the box, he will be just like the rest of them.
He comes to the club every afternoon, timing his arrival so that the non-theatrical and semi-theatrical members will have gone back to their offices in Madison Avenue and Radio City. They know who he is. Even the younger ones, who may never have seen him on the stage, know who he is. Their connections with the theater, which justify their membership in the club, may be tenuous, but their interest in it, whether lifelong or recent, would almost make it mandatory that they know who John Barton Rosedale is, or was. His name is a mouthful and not liable to be forgotten; and if they really know, have taken the trouble to learn, a little about the theater, they associate his name with those of the venerable stars and the prominent managers and the deceased playwrights who were so busy and successful between 1910 and 1930. The young fellows look at him now, and not many of them stop to think that in, say, 1925 John Barton Rosedale was younger than they are today. “Don’t ask me if I ever knew Clyde Fitch,” he has been known to say. “And for Christ’s sake, no! I didn’t play with the divine Sarah.” But he has also been known to say, to one of the Madison Avenue-Radio City boys, “Who did you say? Terence Rattigan? Is he one of the Abbey crowd? I knew Barry Fitzgerald. Real name Shields. But I never heard of Rattigan.” In truth he has heard of Rattigan and of everyone else of any consequence in the New York and London theater; was, in fact, extremely critical of Lunt’s performance in O Mistress Mine. But he will concede nothing to these smarties from the ad agencies and the television studios. If they want to talk theater with him, let them talk business first, and stop giving all the parts to Cedric Hardwicke and Nehemiah Persoff. “I can play a Chinese general,” he says. “I’d be wasted, but I can play one if the money was right. If I can play an Irish priest, I can damn sure make up to play a Chinese general. But the money’d have to be right.” These Madison Avenue-Radio City boys have never done a thing for him, and now that he has told off so many of them, they probably never will. But they know who he is. He is John Barton Rosedale, never a bad performance, never a really bad notice, an actors’ actor. “And I’m not broke, either,” he has said; a boast that is literally but only literally true.
After he pays his ceremonial visit to the mailboxes, he goes to the bar and orders a half-Scotch. He drinks it alone, and it is his only drink in the clubhouse. He declines invitations to join other actors at the bar, and when he has had his drink he says to the bartender, “My people here yet?”
“In the cardroom. Mr. Dowell, Mr. Ruber, and I just saw Mr. Hafey on his way up.”
In a sudden hurry John Barton Rosedale will scribble his last name on the chit and be off to the cardroom. He does not like to be late, but he likes to be last, and he always is.
The others, his people, are in the cardroom, sitting near but not at the bridge table. “Hello, Rosey,” they say.
“The ever punctual Rosedale,” he says. “Always just under the wire. Shall we cut?”
They cut for partners and deal, the game begins, and they play until five o’clock. It is quiet, serious bridge. The players understand each other’s game so well that instead of a lengthy post-mortem, it is only necessary for one player to say, “Harry’s spade lead did it,” and the others will nod, and they will use the time between hands to make brief exchanges of conversation that are cut short at the conclusion of the deal. The four men are not close friends. Their congeniality, such as it is, has been achieved as a result of weeding out players in the past who played badly or much too well, and who by temperament revealed characteristics that were unsuitable to the atmosphere toward which this table was headed. In the beginning it had been John Barton Rosedale and Harry Hafey. Judd Ruber and George Dowell joined the table after other players were left out because they were too argumentative, played too slowly, drank too much, did not bathe often enough, could not be counted on to appear every day, or—in one case—wanted to talk about his troubles with his wife. For six years now the table has been made up of the same four players, who meet every day except matinee days when one or more of the four are working. They all have been actors, but Rosedale and Hafey have remained actors while Dowell makes his living as a free-lance writer, and Ruber is a staff announcer at a radio station. In six years Hafey has been in four flops, and Rosedale has been in one play that ran seven months on Broadway and five weeks on the road. Consequently the rule concerning matinee days has seldom been invoked. It was agreed at the start that no substitute would be invited to sit in for an absent player.
The four men, though not deliberately avoiding each other, make no effort to continue their companionship away from the bridge table. Hafey and his wife live in a theatrical hotel in the West Forties; Dowell, a widower, lives at the club; Ruber, a homosexual, shares an apartment with a friend in West Fifty-eighth near Fifth Avenue; and Rosedale and his wife live in London Terrace. It is a question whether Hafey, who worked regularly for good salaries in the days before heavy taxes, or Ruber, who is highly paid at present, is the best fixed financially. Hafey has an annuity; that much is known. He has one son a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force and another a dentist in Manhasset, Long Island, and both seem to be self-sufficient. Ruber wears a star sapphire ring and has a large collection of oversize cuff links, and he has at least twenty suits that he rotates, a Patek Philippe wristwatch, and a golden dollar-sign money clip which he displays when the day’s bridge score is totted up. He is the youngest member of the foursome—fiftyish—and he was not even a featured player in the days before the income tax became confiscatory. George Dowell, who no longer receives royalty payments for a radio serial based upon his most successful comedy, writes little pieces for the magazine sections of the Sunday newspapers, and is believed to pick up fifty dollars here and there for one-liners he sells to television comedians. He has eighteen thousand dollars in compound interest accounts that he opened when his wife’s estate was settled, and he is writing a book of reminiscences that eventually will appear as the autobiography of a quite well-known actress. She has already paid him more than five thousand dollars for his work, and she now wants to start it all over again, this time without the reticence that she imposed upon herself while her third husband was still alive. Dowell is confident that he will get at least another year’s work out of it and that the book, in its n
ew conception, will be a best-seller.
The four men avoid the topic of their personal finances. Hafey and Ruber, the well-heeled, may now and then exchange more or less general comments on the state of the stock market, but if the money talk continues overlong, they run the risk of another recital by John Barton Rosedale on the subject of his experiences with Goldman, Sachs and Aviation Corporation in the early Thirties. He can be very angry about having been a near-millionaire, and they have heard it all before. “Everything went,” he says. “Everything. The house in Great Neck. My thirty-eight-foot cruiser. I had to resign from North Hempstead, and haven’t been on a golf course since. I had to start all over again, just when I thought I’d never have to worry again about money. But luckily I was in my early thirties and in demand. I was absolutely smashed, financially, but do you know that for the next three years I was never out of work? And I went from a thousand a week to eighteen hundred in the theater before Hollywood beckoned. They started me at twenty-five hundred, and I got all the way up to five thousand before they decided I was too difficult. But I learned one lesson—stay out of the stock market, and don’t put your money in express cruisers. It couldn’t have happened to me at a better time. I suppose nothing would have stopped me from spending my money the way I did when I was in my twenties, but you can be damned sure I was more careful thereafter. You see, by that time I was old enough to get a little sense in me, and I said to Millicent, ‘This time we’re going to put it away.’ No more cruisers and fancy cars—we had a big Lincoln convertible a block long. And no more houses in the suburbs. Or for that matter, apartments on Park Avenue. I know fellows, actors that weren’t making half what I was making, and they loved to give that Park Avenue address. But after I was burnt the first time Millicent and I’ve never had an apartment bigger than four or five rooms. What would we do with one of those large apartments? Millicent does very little entertaining. Mostly the opera crowd for little informal suppers. Spaghetti and red wine, and Millicent loves to cook. I just sit back and relax while they all tell these fascinating stories about grand opera. You think there’s bitchery in the theater? You ought to hear what goes on up at the Met. Stories about Jeritza, and Scotti, and all those people, and going back to Caruso and Tetrazzini. Millicent of course gave it all up when we got married, but she knows the racket inside and out, and they all like to come to our place for our little informal parties. Six, eight people at the most, so it doesn’t get unwieldy. And it’s quite something, you know, to see one of your big opera stars put on an apron and help with the dishes. They love Millicent. I, of course, I’m only that actor fellow that seduced Millicent away from grand opera and made her give up her own career. I didn’t, but that’s what they say, and they really don’t hold it against me. On an opening night I get almost as many wires from Millicent’s opera crowd as I do from show people. They’re very loyal to Millicent. Confide in her, ask her advice. And all they really care about Rosedale is that I’m her husband and apparently made her happy. Oh, I take second billing there, all right, but I don’t mind a bit. It does any actor a world of good to get around in other circles outside of our own profession. And these are talented people, don’t forget. They’re real artists. God knows they’re lousy actors, that I can’t deny. Once in a while I’ll put on my white tie and tails and take Millicent to hear some newcomer that’s been recommended to her, and as far as the singing is concerned, I take my cue from Millicent. If she says a soprano is good, then I know she’s good. But while they’re about it, learning all the various languages and vocalizing and all that, it beats me why they don’t spend a few hundred dollars on a dramatic coach. I wouldn’t want the job myself, but occasionally I’ve made a few suggestions. I don’t know whether they ever took them or not. The last thing I’d ever want to do would be to try to teach anybody to act. Hell, I took fencing lessons for two years when I was starting out, and I’m sure they taught me how to move about. But I didn’t believe then and I don’t believe now that you can be taught how to act. The tricks, yes. But not what has to come from down here and up here. The old ticker and the old gray matter, that’s the combination. Plus the dedication, the pride, the love of the whole stinking God damn racket, regardless of the cheap sons of bitches that run things today.”
“You’re absolutely right, Rosey,” says Hafey.
“Where is there a man like Hoppy today?” says John Barton Rosedale.
“You don’t mean the billiard player?” says Ruber.
“Arthur Hopkins,” says George Dowell.
“Of course! I thought of Willie Hoppe because he came on a show I was announcing, oh, several years ago.”
“Shall we cut? I didn’t mean to get launched on that subject,” says John Barton Rosedale. “How did I get started? We were talking about Wall Street, for Christ’s sake. Well, it’s lucky we got away from that. I have the nine of clubs. George, it looks like you and me start.”
“And I believe it’s my deal, with the diamond king,” says Harry Hafey.
John Barton Rosedale is an honest sixty-seven now, and when five o’clock comes and the day’s last rubber has been scored, he goes downstairs and has a cup of free tea and the free Lorna Doones and Hydroxes that are served with it. He is at home with a cup of tea; it has been a prop of his in three or four plays, and nowadays he gets a lift from the brew itself. He needs that lift; the bridge game could go on for many more hours and so long as he was playing he would not notice how tired he was getting. But at five o’clock or thereabouts he is ready to quit; his body and his brain are ready to quit. His long legs have been too long in a fixed, sitting position, and he has learned to get slowly to his feet, to move about slowly while Harry Hafey is totting up the day’s score.
“I have this damned sacroiliac,” says Judd Ruber, the youngest of the players. “I think it must have something to do with my weight. I ought to take off thirty pounds. But I can’t resist starchy foods. As Alec Woollcott said, everything I like is either illegal, immoral, or fattening.”
“I think G. K. Chesterton said it first,” says George Dowell.
“Well, whoever said it, it applies to me,” says Judd Ruber. “Rosey, how do you keep in such good shape? Do you do exercise?”
“Exercise? Yes. I stand up while I’m shaving. That’s my exercise,” says John Barton Rosedale. But he is pleased that no one has noticed that he has been hesitant about getting to his feet. “I don’t believe my weight has varied five pounds since I was a young fellow in my twenties. This jacket and waistcoat—”
“I was about to ask you,” says Ruber. “You had them made in England?”
“In London in 1930. English friend of mine sent me to Jason Driggs, just off Savile Row, and being flush at the time, I ordered four lounge suits, a dinner jacket, and a suit of tails. I’ve still got them all. This suit, the trousers have gone, but I rather like it with slacks.”
“It’s very country, the black and white check, but you can wear that and get away with it,” says Ruber.
“Well, I don’t know about that,” says John Barton Rosedale. “That is, I don’t know whether I do get away with it or not, but I know damn well there isn’t a better-made suit in the club, and I’ve always been whatever the opposite is to a slave of fashion. I wear what I think is right for me, not for Jack Paar, or Douglas Fairbanks Junior. I have that other Driggs suit that I wear with slacks. The plaid?”
“Doesn’t have quite the same snap, the same dash as this one,” says Ruber.
“Well, this is a check, and the other’s a Glen plaid. But do you know what these suits would cost me to duplicate today?”
“I certainly do. Not less than two-fifty apiece at any halfway decent tailor’s,” says Ruber.
“Two seventy-five, the fellow I go to,” says Rosedale “I can’t see myself paying that much for a suit.”
“Well, you could probably go to Brooks and get something off the rack and look well in it,” says Ruber.
>
“Thank you, Judd. If the part called for it, that’s what I’d do. Last year I read for a part, a university president. A good part. But I wouldn’t work for the money they were paying, so we never did get together. However, for that part I most likely would have gone to Brooks, got one off the rack.” They say their farewells and go their separate ways, John Barton Rosedale to his cup of tea and Lorna Doones.
He does not stay long. It is now the time that the Madison Avenue-Radio City types begin to drift in for cocktails. “Why do they want to come here?” he asks, when there is an actor friend to listen. “They have their own places. The Advertising Club is where they belong, not here. But no, they have to come here because they want to be part of show business. Show biz, I hear them call it. Show biz. But do they do anything for any of us?”
“Well, you know they do, Rosey, once in a while. Paul Ingles.”
“Paul Ingles. Every time I ask that question I always get Paul Ingles for an answer. Now let me tell you about Paul Ingles. In the first place, Paul Ingles is a toady, a sycophant. He got a job on a radio serial, ten years ago, and he’s the one brought these radio and television people into the club. They know he’s on their side, so they always see to it that he gets a job. Where else could he? I recognized his voice the other day on a radio commercial. For dog food. That’s Paul Ingles, and that’s the man that’s supposed to be the great example of how those people help us. Not that it makes any difference to me personally. I’m not quite reduced to doing dog food commercials or any other commercials. And I’d never be a toady for anyone. But you look around here any afternoon and you’ll see half a dozen good actors that come here hoping one of those outsiders will give them a television job. It’s enough to break your heart, seeing fellows like Earl Stafford hamming it up for one of these hucksters. ‘I don’t believe we’ve met,’ he said to one of them the other day. ‘I’m Earl Stafford, welcome to the club.’ And buying drinks for them. They have expense accounts, but has Earl Stafford got an expense account? I happen to know that Earl is supported by a group of members that work in Hollywood. And how much longer will that last, with Hollywood the way it is now? Earl Stafford, this is. Not one of your Ed Minzers. Poor Ed was always one jump ahead of the sheriff, but Earl knew the time when he could practically command his own price. He was a draw. But now he feels he has to buy drinks for advertising hucksters, and what does it get him? Maybe you’d better not be seen talking to me. They know how I feel about them.”